When in 1871 I encountered Navajos for the first time, on their way to trade with the Mormons, I do not remember seeing them have any silver ornaments. This was so soon after their liberation from government confinement following their war with us that they were, naturally, very poor. But if they had before possessed much silver they would have concealed it, and by the time I saw the ones referred to they would again have been wearing it and trying to trade it for horses, which they sadly needed. The Navajo silver-work is distinguished by an extremely artistic quality. Their tools and appliances are very rude and simple. As their method of operation is probably similar to that of Amerinds who have not been observed as closely, I will condense here some of the important details as given by Washington Matthews.[265] Only a few have attained a degree of proficiency that enables them to make large hollow articles, like flasks and the like, but there are many who can turn out bracelets, buttons, buckles, etc. Their appliances consist “of a forge, a bellows, an anvil, crucibles, moulds, tongs, scissors, pliers, files, awls, cold chisels, matrix and die for moulding buttons, wooden implements used in grinding buttons, wooden stake, basin, charcoal, tools and materials for soldering (blow-pipe, braid of cotton rags soaked in grease, wire, and borax), materials for polishing (sandpaper, emery paper, powdered sandstone, sand, ashes, and solid stone), and materials for whitening (a native mineral substance—almogen—salt and water).” The forge is built up with several old boards, an old box, or, when these cannot be procured, of sticks. The nozzle of the bellows, being wood, is kept back from the fire several inches and a continuation built in the mud with which the fire-bed is constructed. The bellows is a tube of goatskin, a foot long and ten inches in diameter, distended by two or three wooden hoops. The back of it is a disc of wood with a valve in it. The nozzle is of four pieces of wood tied together and having a hole an inch square through the centre, the outside being dressed off till it is approximately round. Any old piece of iron, like the king-bolt of a wagon, driven into a log serves for an anvil, though in the absence of this a hard stone is sufficient. They make their own crucibles of clay, generally three-cornered, about two inches in every dimension, and baked hard. “The moulds in which they cast their ingots, cut in soft sandstone with a home-made chisel, are so easily formed that the smith leaves them behind when he moves his residence.” “Metallic hemispheres for beads and buttons are made in a concave matrix by means of a round-pointed bolt.” Several matrices are made on a single bar of iron and a bolt that will fit the smallest is sufficient to work all. They prepare charcoal by building a large fire, and when it is “reduced to a mass of glowing coals they smother it well with earth and leave it to cool.”